Carol, Julie, thank you for your thoughtful responses.
Carol, you said:
I could easily see a story focusing on Lois and Clark in the universe created by "Honesty" but that doesn't mean she needs to be the focus of a story that's not about her, which is the impression I'm getting about the later "Anne" books - they're not about her.
Some years ago, I had long discussions about Anne of Green Gables with one of my best friends. She said exactly the same thing that you just said - that the last book in the Anne series was simply not about Anne. Or rather, what my friend said was that at first she was surprised and a bit disappointed that Anne was all but absent in the last book, but then she accepted that the book simply wasn't about Anne. And when she had accepted that, she had no objections to reading about Anne's daughter rather than about Anne herself.
I understand very well that that you can approach "Rilla of Ingleside" that way. I'm sure L.M. Montgomery would have wanted her readers to take that approach. And there is no way ever that I can say that any of you are wrong for looking at "Rilla of Ingleside" in that light.
But for myself, I still feel as if I've been watching a two-hour movie about a person's life, and suddenly I find myself rather shockingly cheated out of a proper ending. It is as if the main character suddenly and mysteriously all but disappeared from the last fifteen minutes of the movie and was replaced by a short guest appearance of her daughter. Somehow I doubt that the main character would have disappeared from the story like that at an age of only around fifty, if said main character had been a man.
So, Carol, Julie, there is no way I can say that your approach to the last book is
wrong. L.M. Montgomery would undoubtedly say that it was right. It was just shocking, confusing and saddening to
me, that's all. And no: I still can't accept it, any more than I would have been able to accept the ending of that movie.
Julie, I really need to make myself clear on a few points:
She wasn't mute. She wasn't bored at home like a stabled horse. She was a busy mother to her children, wife to Gilbert and, like Wendy said, a contributor to his work.
Yes, she was, up until the last book. Or rather: if she was all of that in the last book too, I didn't get the impression that L.M. Montgomery found it worth mentioning.
Like someone else said, that's the nature of family sagas.
But this isn't a family saga, not really. It isn't a multi-generation tale. It is not as if we are told all that much about the lives of Anne's children, let alone about the lives of her grandchildren. Like I said: The story about Anne is like a two-hour movie where the main character disappears from the movie during the last fifteen minutes.
You said that Anne and Laura lived in similar societies but different social stratums, and while Anne was "mute" and "bored" Laura was active and fulfilled. Which tells me that you believe someone who lived in that sort of society had the potential to be happy in your opinion.
Absolutely, Julie!
Of course people who lived at that time had the capacity to be happy. That includes people like Anne. I'm sure there were women like Anne at that time and in that society who were happy and who had interesting lives when they were fifty!
So why in the world would you ever think that Lois, feisty and passionate and proactive Lois, living in Metropolis, would fade away into the wallpaper?
I guess I was really wondering if people who write a lot of LnC fics find fifty-year-old Lois sufficiently interesting to want to write stories about middle-aged married Lois and Clark. And I was also wondering if those who do write about middle-aged Lois and Clark will let Lois herself "fade from the story" more and more and move the focus of the story to Clark or their kids instead. I know that there is one story, "When the World Finds Out" by CC Aiken, where the portrayal of middle-aged Lois and middle-aged Clark is just wonderful. They have kids, but the focus of the story is on them, and Lois is just terrific in it. I love it. I was wondering if there are more fics like that, and then I mean fics about middle-aged Lois and Clark where the focus is on Lois at least
almost as much as it is on Clark.
You point out that there are flaws in every society. Yes, there are. Does that mean that there aren't any happy people out there in the world? No.
You are so right, Julie. It absolutely doesn't mean that!
Ann, look around: if you think for one second that the world we live in is even close to "ideal", you're kidding yourself.
I don't believe that our modern societies are "ideal", Julie.
Yeah... all societies have flaws... and there can be happy people in all of them.
Absolutely!
What you just said was "because of societal rules back then, no one could be happy no matter what."
I would never say that. Never! Believe me, I don't think that human beings were "meant", either by God or by evolution, to be happy only in societies like our modern Western world. Of course not! If anything, you could probably argue that our modern world is a bit unnatural for us.
Because Montgomery succeeded, and furthermore, I daresay that real women who lived back then sometimes found happiness too.
I don't doubt for a moment that there were women like Anne who lived in Anne's days who were very happy with their lives. But I still have to insist that Montgomery failed to convince
me that
Anne was happy after her children had grown up, or more specifically: "Rilla of Ingleside" didn't strike me as any sort of tribute to Anne's happiness. If a long fic about Lois and Clark's grown children had only given Lois a guest appearance where she mentioned, in passing, that she had found her first gray hair, then I wouldn't have felt that Lois at that point was very happy with her life with Clark.
I just don't see how this ties into Montgomery's books.
The point I tried to make was that both Rousseau and Montgomery were trying to write books about "ideal" characters and situations. They both placed their characters in more or less patriarchal societies. Rousseau was such a horrible sexist that I'm sure it didn't bother him if all his female characters went down the drain, but Montgomery would have cared about her female character's happiness. She would have wanted, and tried, to make Anne happy even in a society that was fairly restrictive for women. I have to return to my movie metaphor - I think Montgomery "directed a movie" where the main character disappeared toward the end, because Montgomery couldn't come up with anything for her to do during the last fifteen minutes. In that way, I think Montgomery failed to show me that Anne got a happy middle age. But that doesn't mean that I think it was impossible for middle-aged women of that time to be happy!
I'm not saying that you should agree with me about my take on Anne and L.M. Montgomery. I know that probably none of you do! Oh well. I wrote this post mostly to emphasize that I definitely don't believe that women must live in our modern Western society in order to be happy. Heavens, no! Plese don't misunderstand me about that. I can see so many women being happy in the time of Anne, and I think that Anne's childhood friend Diana would probably be perfectly happy in it. Diana probably wanted nothing more in life that a good and loving husband, sweet children and a nice home. Oh, she would want good friends and neighbours too, and a calm and predictable life. I can see no reason why her own time and society wouldn't provide her with all of that. Yes, Diana would be happy, and many other women would be happy, too. But maybe, maybe women with intellectual ambitions, like Anne and possibly like L.M. Montgomery herself, just maybe found the restrictive rules about women in their society an impediment to their personal happiness.
Ann
